Author Archives: Kristin Dragos

To the People of the World

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Created November 13, 2020

I am an American. I also consider myself a citizen of Earth, and a member of the Human Race club.

From my point of view, we have been spending too much time competing for political power to get done any of the immense things that we HAVE TO get done.

And then when somebody wins power, the other major party blocks getting anything done.

And the voters then seem to forget who actually tried to get something done, and who spent all their time blocking it.

This might not be worth discussing if everything was going to take care of itself because we are already in utopia.

However, there are not one but six tidal wave problems coming at us from all directions which all of us have to solve together, one way or another, with or without cooperating with each other, or we won’t be around anymore. They are also getting worse the longer we fool around. And we make each one of them worse by refusing to cooperate with each other.

  1. Pandemic
  2. American Schism
  3. World Debt
  4. Environment (and future pandemics if deforestation continues)
  5. International Envy
  6. Half of us might not find work (robotics)

We’ve seen from the pandemic that it doesn’t work as well when each State comes up with its own way of doing things. The bigger the problem, the more important wide scale cooperation is.

I recommend that the next time you read about any politician making a statement about anything other than one of these six problems, you ignore it, and let them know where you want them to refocus their attention.

Please let me know if my list is too short.

For manageability I grouped related challenges together, for example racial/ethnic/gender/all-inclusive equality is really at the core of problem #2.

“International Envy” groups together the threats from other nations, terrorist organizations, and all of the vendettas lingering from the distant and/or recent past.

It is easy to predict that we will be more efficient and faster about turning the tide on these threats the more we can work together.

I recommend the next time you read about any politician making a negative statement about anybody, you ignore it, and let them know where you want them to put their energies instead of this endless backbiting.

I recommend that you stop sending and mentioning in social media or in any venue “the backbiting channel” which has become the top-rated audience draw of all time. The computers will notice that and stop depending on it for the maximum audience draw that it has recently become.

I predict you will also, then, sleep better.

There are ways we can use our wonderful media to share constructive innovative ideas with one another. What we really need is for officials to start to practice the modes of creativity and to use each other’s ideas without caring about who gets the credit so much. I depict such media being used in a crisis similar to ours in a science fiction novel PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices (hope you will read the free sample available through the link).

Some time ago, two U.S. presidents and two dozen other well-known top US officials responded supportively to my idea that INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION can channel people into the specializations that perfectly match their inner purpose and skills, with corporations and work study programs meshing with the process from the earliest grades. Recently a friend in Germany told me that those ideas had taken hold over there.

Adults also need individualized education now if they are out of regular school but also out of regular work – or want to be in a different field.

We seem to have a ready workforce of life coaches who could be organized to help those out of school for whom life is not working out as joyfully as it could be if they were doing work that they loved. They would then be more likely to get into Flow state, where they could make more money, but even without the money would at least be doing what they were born to be good at.

Once totally successful, welfare and other transfer payments would dwindle to virtually nothingness. Individualized Education is the kind of work we ought to be doing in the 21st Century.

That’s only one innovative approach worth exploring and work on from both sides of the aisle together. There will be a panoply of exciting new ideas unleashed from the combination of crowdsourcing and a nonpartisan lens.

Let’s make political parties invisible for a while, can we?

When Japan was in the process of taking over China, with one city falling after the next, even more than US aid the ability of the Chinese Civil War combatants to temporarily unite was what pushed Japan off the mainland.

Can you imagine what will happen if we don’t stop it now and return to the normal we were used to for 200 years? We could be fighting WWIII in the streets and on the hills of America, first with each other, and then when other countries come over to help one side, it will be like the early days of America when Brits, French, Germans, and others were here fighting, except it’s more likely to be other superpowers and rogue nations. That’s the current direction we are pushing ourselves in by dividing the house so that it cannot stand.

Proof or not, the unbelievable intensity and extremity of it makes it hard to believe that a lot of it is not being caused by foreign powers.

Each of us can’t expect other people to take this advice while each of us keep dishing the dirt. We have to change ourselves first. Friends will read our silences or hear our remarks and understand that we have dropped out of the cycle of hate. The more of us do that, the more of them will do it, until there is no more them.

There never was a Them, it’s always been just US.

May The Center Hold,

God Bless America and each of you,

Bill

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Both “Sides” Are Protecting America In Their Own Minds

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Created November 6, 2020

If we can keep from becoming emotionally stampeded, we can reach compromises in a more pleasant way that are creative, innovative, bold, exciting, inspiring, and consensus based.

Isn’t that the whole point of Democracy?

How did we get so divided so fast? It seems hard to believe based on what had gone before.

We all grew up with the same values. Other countries were corrupt, we were taught, but here we had the privilege of living in a democracy, where there is concern for every individual.

Who could disagree that this is a core American value? No one. WE are united on this foundation. This is not red or blue it is America.

THIS is why we can get teary eyed hearing the national anthem or remembering the righteous things we have done. America is a noble cause and human beings are built to sense such things intuitively.

It helps, when we get out of perspective and exaggerate how far apart we are, to remember the common ground upon which we stand, with each other here at home, and with former allies around the world who had followed our guidance for two hundred years, and will be like the prodigal father when we return with them.

Relaxing, from the fight against the Left or Right, as we are doing together here, here’s two thoughts about how we got so split recently.

Factor 1: Please take into account that political advertising and more broadly speaking political propaganda, has recently so well learned its Internet lesson, that the Orwellian implications are becoming disturbingly clear.

While television has always been stabilized by common consent, it’s a ruder patois which rules digital. The mind frame into which one can be catapulted by a wrong keystroke, dwarfs the ability of television shows to give me nightmares as a subteen. The wildness of the Internet is its leitmotif, its taste. We are transfixed by its unpredictability. Whereas television has a product that relies upon dependability and therefore predictability.

It might help to picture the media as an actual alien being determined to take over our minds. In reality it has that equal power, although not alien.

Factor 2: When I was 8 years old I “knew” the Commies were my enemy.

The screen media hypnotic effect in my era was a firefly in relation to the digital sun today. But it was enough to inculcate me into believing in enemies and believing that Commies were my enemies.

Many propagandists on our side as well as folks like Joseph McCarthy pumped this “Pinko” thing up to humongous proportions from the 1919 Red Scare and it’s still with us today. That’s coming up on a century we have been conditioned to think of Commies as the enemy.

Then Donald Trump called Democrats Pinkos. Is it any wonder that Follower types would transfer all the hate, rage, and violence in their souls against Democrats, based simply on the anti-Communism perspective imbued into every American living today?

It’s an oversimplification to paint people who lean slightly left as if they are at the left pole. Just as it’s an oversimplification to do it to those who lean slightly right.

The middle is what really counts. Let’s come back to the middle together, voluntarily, individually, please dear reader, take the initiative yourself.

We all want the same things – with enough differences among us on the details to keep life interesting. Let’s not be driven into insane rage by media overdrive or people who will risk our minds and our peace to gain even more power over us.

Let’s stop before we hurt ourselves more. Our strength in in our unity, disunity only brings us weakness and ultimately defeat.

Best to all,

Bill

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The Follower Type

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Created November 2, 2020

A long time ago we each made up our own mind for ourselves. Language did not exist, and so there was no way to convince one another of any given viewpoint.

That all changed when language came along.

Life then became gradually more complex. There were more things to think about and wonder about.

It started to get awfully difficult to know whom to believe about some really important things. Like God. And how to run a State.

A new type of person began to emerge who had never existed before. This new type did not even know it was a type. These were people just like you and me. They weren’t especially good or especially bad. They weren’t especially smart or stupid.

They became a recognizable type because they combined certain psychological patterns that had never existed before.

  1. They really wanted to know who was right and who was wrong. They cared a LOT about right and wrong, they sincerely did.
  2. They thought a lot about it and couldn’t make their minds up no matter how hard they tried. They got very upset about this and could not take it anymore.
  3. One day, a switch went off inside them and they became The Follower Type. Rather than try to think for themselves they abrogated that right and committed to following some system or person. They subscribed to a pre-packaged viewpoint, achieving closure from mental dissonance, feeling the tonic chord which resolves the musical anticipations of that final perfect resting place.

Capitalism. Communism. Religion X. Religion Y. Republican. Democrat.

Wikipedia calls this type The Authoritarian Type and writes – prepare yourself dear reader, this is going to seem like an opposite type, but it’s one type with two ends:

In The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Theodor W. Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford proposed a personality type that involved the “potentially fascistic individual.”[3] The historical background that influenced the theoretical development of the authoritarian personality included the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Second World War (1939–1945), and the Holocaust, which indicated that the fascistic individual was psychologically susceptible to the ideology of anti-Semitism and to the emotional appeal of anti-democratic politics.

The authoritarian personality has a strict superego, which controls a weak ego that is unable to cope with the strong impulses of the id. The resulting intrapsychic conflicts cause personal insecurities, which result in the superego adhering to externally imposed conventional norms (conventionalism), and unquestioning obedience to the authorities who impose and administer the social norms of society (authoritarian submission). The ego-defense mechanism of psychological projection arises when the authoritarian person avoids self-reference to the anxiety-producing impulse(s) of the id, by projecting the impulse(s) onto the “inferior” minority social-groups of the culture (projectivity), which are expressed by way of greatly evaluative and harshly judgemental beliefs (power and toughness) and rigid (stereotypy).

The authoritarian person also presents a cynical and disdainful view of humanity, and a need to wield power and be tough, which arise from the anxieties produced by the perceived lapses of people who do not abide by the conventions and social norms of society (destructiveness and cynicism); a general tendency to focus upon people who violate the value system, and to act oppressively against them (authoritarian aggression); anti-intellectualism, a general opposition to the subjective and imaginative tendencies of the mind (anti-intraception); a tendency to believe in mystic determination (superstition); and an exaggerated concern with sexual promiscuity.

In human psychological development, the formation of the authoritarian personality occurs within the first years of a child’s life, strongly influenced and shaped by the parents’ personalities and the organizational structure of the child’s family; thus, parent-child relations that are “hierarchical, authoritarian, [and] exploitative” can result in a child developing an authoritarian personality.[4] Authoritarian-personality characteristics are fostered by parents who have a psychological need for domination, and who harshly threaten their child to compel obedience to conventional behaviors. Moreover, such domineering parents also are preoccupied with social status, a concern they communicate by having the child follow rigid, external rules. In consequence of such domination, the child suffers emotionally from the suppression of his or her feelings of aggression and resentment towards the domineering parents, whom the child reverently idealizes, but does not criticize.

(Source: Wikipedia) The solution to consider is to educate people from an early age to recognize any such impulses within themselves, and to lead them back to making their own minds up for themselves, rather than subscribing whole cloth to some existing body of beliefs, simply to relieve the inner tension created by not having any guidepost at all.

We might teach the young that in personal experience one rarely finds leaders who are always right or always wrong, the lesson being that the individual should always be checking his/her own compass on the leaders whoever they are.

May the Center Hold.

God Bless America,

Bill

 

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See Through the Things That Still Manipulate You

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Created October 30, 2020

You know what I mean. You’ve already conquered many of the things that used to push your buttons. Now maybe they can still get your goat from time to time when they catch you suddenly off guard while you are dealing with something else, or when you are just totally exhausted.

When I was 9 years old I refused to learn long division. Whenever the subject came up I became uneasy and defensive. My mind shrank in its capabilities because of the negative emotional tone I became trapped in.

When I was 12 years old I refused to wear glasses. It upset me whenever I was forced to put them on.

I’m sure the things you were vulnerable to as a child were silly like mine, and you’ve put them all away as I have mine.

Yet even as adults there are things that still can disturb our mental emotional tranquility. They somehow grab us and take over our minds and emotions. We are suddenly afraid or angry or simply not having a good time all of a sudden.

The next time that happens to you, observe it as a scientist would. What was it that took away your good mood? Why did you let it? What inside of you was the traitor? What fixated attachment do you have – perhaps to some image of yourself – that made you vulnerable being taken over as it by a spell?

Politics is one thing that can do it.

Modern Internet and all the other media we have now, is another thing that can do it.

These things can get to me if I learn about something happening which I wish I could fix, and I realize the enormity of the thing, and my own relative helplessness to come to the rescue. The frustration at not being able to do enough to help is still capable of disturbing my mental emotional tranquility sometimes. At most times I can turn it off like an alarm clock by contemplating what I can do, whether it will have much of an effect or not, and then doing it, without getting hung up on what the outcome might be.

We have to be able to rise above politics. In American Pragmatic Idealism there is a pantheon of ideals we hold high, some of which are more important to the conserving side of our natures, and some of which are more important to the progressing side of our natures, but all Americans want all of these things:

REPUBLICANS

 DEMOCRATS

FREEDOM

EQUALITY

INDEPENDENCE

JUSTICE
FRUGALITY

BENEVOLENCE

DEMAND WHAT YOU DESERVE

PEACE

STOICISM

SELF IMPROVEMENT

 

People employed in government can be expected to be above average in being motivated by Power. This is not necessarily a bad thing if it causes us to have enough people interested in governance so the rest of us don’t have to spend more time on that than we individually feel like. We each have to devote some time to governance because that’s the nature of the deal in a democracy.

But Power as we all know can corrupt. And the lust for power can cause people to become manipulative and to use today’s incredibly powerful media to force a foothold in our private mental emotional space. These messages from both sides will tend to exaggerate the dangers of letting the other side win, and will tend to push us into warring camps. This is intentional or unintentional or both, but that is irrelevant, because one way or the other, it is happening. Only we can learn to be strong enough to prevent our own mental invasion by manipulative and maddening stimuli and memes.

We have a good thing going here. First, life itself. Second, this magically beautiful and awe-inspiring planet we all love. Third, love itself. The list goes on. It includes science. It includes America, and more generally, the notion of Democracy. The governance of the Universe which evidently loves us, wanted us to have all these good things.

We have to shake off the willies and get in touch with our own gratitude for the good thing we all have here all around us. We have to keep it going, and make it better where we can, without blaming or being unkind to one another.

Superman, the comic book character launched in 1939, through his writers, coined the phrase “Truth, Beauty, and The American Way”, just in time for WWII. Those were Superman’s ideals, his motivations, even though he didn’t come from America, he came from Krypton.

Many 18-year old GIs dying on the battlefield probably held the phrase in their hearts to keep themselves fighting to the last.

Truth is mentioned first of the three Superman ideals. Who is lying more to us, and who is lying less? Even if we cynically assume they are all lying to us (which I do not), we should at least be able to make a careful judgment call, citing specific evidence to ourself, as to who is probably lying more to us and who is probably lying less to us.

It’s time for you to vote, if you haven’t already done so. Voting is not only our right it’s our duty. If we do nothing else in the social compact we made with our country, that’s the one thing we must do, at least for presidential elections. Stand up and be counted. Take responsibility. Be a leader. Be true to yourself. What do YOU stand for? To not vote is to state that you stand for nothing. Nihilism. Disrespect for life.

If you’re being prevented from voting by BS rules, it’s up to you to find the way to overcome that BS. The Universe will help you if you put out the effort, and you will vote.

Hold your heart steady. Be able to go on if whoever you vote for, the other folks win. Keep in mind the long view of America. Its checks and balances were carefully worked out and there’s a good chance no matter who is in charge of the various houses of government here, the system itself will protect us. Moreover, have confidence in the strength of the good. Not only in America but around the world. Don’t write off the billions of good people we’ve got on this planet.

The center is where we all pull together. When we don’t hold the center, things can get out of hand.

May the center hold.

Best to all, and God Bless America.

Bill

A Song for Today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NqszdLiJxg

 

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